


The Panspermia: Ends Justify Means

by Jackkel Dragon (jackkel_dragon)



Category: The Panspermia
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-09
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 14:33:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7718527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackkel_dragon/pseuds/Jackkel%20Dragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While the survivors aboard the Panspermia have escaped Harmonia, the nightmare is far from over. A terrible choice lies ahead, and not everyone can be saved...</p>
<p>This story takes place immediately after the events of The Panspermia, starting with a modified version of the epilogue and featuring Annika Klein and Bill Barrett as the NPC survivors from the main game. Spoilers for the main game are rampant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Panspermia: Ends Justify Means

"Survey team, report in."

Activating his suit's communication channel, a holographic view of the captain appeared before the sergeant of the survey team. "Sir. We've searched most of the ship, only the medical bay remains. The two survivors we found were sent back to the ship with an escort. We found two identifiable bodies, which scans list as Commander Baker and Engineer Attlee, as well as one cadaver mutilated past our equipment's ability to ID."

"Finish your sweep and report to me once you're finished. We'll need to tell Nicolas Corp. what happened to their ship."

"Yes, sir." The sergeant let the channel get cut by the captain as he motioned for his men to open the medical bay doors. "Let's wrap this up, people."

They all filed into the room, headlights on and rifles in hand. A body was laying on the ground in a pool of blood, appearing partially eaten. One of the soldiers took out a scanner and knelt down to ID the body. A sound alerted the sergeant, who aimed his rifle at the corner of the room it came from.

Laying on the recovery bed was a woman, mostly naked except for the torn remains of a protective suit. Her stomach was torn open, exposing her insides, and blood was still oozing from the wound.

Motioning for the medic on the team to attempt first aid, the sergeant opened up the channel to the ship again. "Captain, we found another survivor. Her abdomen has been ripped open, we'll need the med bay alerted now if we want to have a chance of saving her."

"Copy that. I'll let them know." The captain nodded and terminated the connection to make his call.

A cough and gurgle caused the sergeant to turn back to the recovery bed. There was another person there now, a young girl by the look of her. But the sound had come from his medic, who was now clutching at his torn throat.

"Hostile!" The sergeant raised his rifle and heard his men snap to action. "You, girl! Stand down or we'll open fire!"

The girl turned to look at the captain and he froze. She had an eerie grin on her face that didn't match the blood spatter on her person and the reddened blade in her hand. "My brothers will take care of you."

Before the sergeant could ask what that meant, he heard screams from behind him. He spun around to see... "something" devouring one of his men. He fired at the monster, but it was too late for the soldier. By the time the monster keeled over, the man was missing his head.

More of the monsters came out from the shadows, seeking vengeance for their fallen brother. The soldiers fired wildly, trying to kill them before they got too close. But even their military-grade weapons weren't strong enough to stop this many of them quickly enough to survive.

As the sergeant grasped at the socket where he once had another arm, pain blotting out his thoughts, the little girl stood above him. He looked up, still not understanding what was happening.

"It's dinner time." The girl smiled as she said this. She plunged the blade into the sergeant's chest.

\-----

Emergency sirens began to go off, and Klein looked to Barrett for an explanation. He shrugged and got up from his seat to go ask the medical officer.

"What's going on with the siren?" He said once the man had turned from his work.

The man shrugged, a worried frown on his face. "Usually there'd be an announcement, unless the siren was activated by an automated system. Even then, there should have been a pre-recorded message..."

The door to the medical bay opened and a soldier ran in, out of breath. "Something was on that ship we picked up! It killed the survey team and used their nanomachines to trick the airlock into letting them in." He stopped to catch his breath. "Whatever it is knew how to override the automatic emergency announcements."

Klein stood up from her seat, suddenly gripped with fear and doubt. What could have been on their ship? None of the monsters that had been on the ship were still alive when they left Harmonia... "Wh-what about Rouse?"

The soldier shook his head. "No idea about any other survivors."

"The captain told me that the survey team found someone before they lost contact." The medical officer explained. "A woman, with her abdomen ripped open."

Panic started to pulse through Klein's veins. Had Rouse been attacked by whatever stowed away with them? Was April okay? Klein couldn't bear losing anyone else...

Barrett cursed and started pacing. "I thought we dealt with this!" He turned to the soldier. "Is there an armory nearby? We'll need some heavy firepower if this mystery enemy is what I think it is."

"Uh..." The soldier hesitated, surely worrying about regulations regarding allowing strangers to take weapons from their supply. But the hesitation lasted only a moment. "This way!"

The four of them ran into the hallway, Klein barely keeping pace with the men. She wanted to rest after the nightmare on Harmonia, not be thrust into another nightmare. The sound of weapons discharging was heard echoing through the ship.

Suddenly, the PA system snapped on, appearing on screens throughout the ship. "This is your captain speaking. Unknown hostiles have breached the ship. They're resistant to our primary weapons, but they seem susceptible to anything that can cut through them. Find a saw or laser cutter ASAP and aim for their methods of locomotion. They can be killed, but we can't afford to waste ammo until we can regroup.

"All personnel not cleared for weapon use should report to the disaster room immediately. I want everyone else to find weapons and meet my team outside the disaster room. This is not a drill, so get your ass in gear if you want to live!"

Barrett turned his head to look at the soldier they were following. "Does this ship have any escape pods or lifeboats?"

"I think so..." The man shook his head. "But I don't know if they can fit all of us."

"That's shitty planning." Barrett muttered, but let the conversation end.

When the group reached the armory, the soldier keyed in a password and the door slid open. Everyone started reaching for weapons and equipment, but Klein was out of her element here. She froze, uncertain of what to do.

Suddenly, an EVA suit was pressed to her chest. She looked up to see Barrett, his shades making it look like he was staring at her. "Put that on. It's not much, but it's better than no armor."

Reluctantly, Klein stepped into the suit and zipped it up. Once it registered to the nanomachines in her bloodstream, it assembled a helmet around her head and she saw readouts of her vitals on the HUD. As a trained nurse, the heart rate value was alarming to her.

Barrett also handed Klein a laser cutter, but she refused to take it at first. "I'll just hit someone on our side!" She protested.

"You need a weapon in case we get separated, so take it." Barrett forced Klein to take the weapon to prevent it from falling onto her feet when he let go. He nodded to the soldier. "We better meet up outside the disaster room, like your captain ordered."

"Right." The soldier took a deep breath, his helmet making it sound like a sucking noise. "Let's go."

As they got out into the hallway, they saw a woman getting torn apart by one of the monsters. She fired a handgun at the alien, but the shots that connected barely seemed to scratch it. Her fight was ended when the monster bit her head off.

The medical officer turned to reach for Klein's hand, intending to guide her out of the armory that she was considering returning to as she backed away from the gory sight. But his hand suddenly fell to the floor, removed from his body by a sharp appendage.

Screaming in fear, Klein wildly shot at the monster that was advancing on her. Her aim was erratic, a result of her lack of weapons training, her fear and exhaustion, and her propensity for clumsiness. The first few shots went wide, followed by one that cut off the monster's bladed appendage. But she had fired an extra shot, which took the medical officer's legs off at the knees.

Barrett and the soldier finished off the monster in a hail of laser bolts and gunfire, but Klein's eyes were locked on the face of the man she had just maimed. His eyes had gone wide with the pain from losing three of his limbs in mere seconds, and he collapsed to the floor. Wounds as severe as his, during an emergency like this, doomed him to certain death.

Despite this, Klein hesitated when Barrett shouted at her to get moving. Her legs eventually obeyed, but her mind had burned the image of the medical officer's murder into her brain. How many more people would die before this nightmare was over? She had already lost too much to bear.

As the group neared the disaster room, they saw people running from that part of the hallway, firing back into the room. Some of the aliens began to jump out at the fleeing survivors. One of the braver soldiers used a fire axe to cut one of the monsters in two in order to save a non-combatant. However, she was rewarded with the sight of her legs being broken off at the hip by another monster.

Barrett and the soldier fired at the aliens, trying to buy more time for everyone to flee to another part of the ship. Klein's hands were shaking, and she didn't dare raise her weapon to shoot. In refusing to fire, she noticed something the others didn't. In the chaos, two figures were not fleeing from the monsters. One of them looked barely human, like someone turned inside out, with only the remains of a Nicolas Corporation suit to identify them. The other was a little girl wearing the undershirt of someone twice her size.

Klein's heart sank, her mind losing focus as she pieced together what had happened. She couldn't know--didn't want to know--the details, but April and Rouse were somehow behind this. And Rouse was no longer human.

The pain of realizing that the one person she had counted on to survive Harmonia had turned against her caused Klein to stumble, falling to her knees. She had already watched so many die, was forced to see the corpse of Brandt, had worked so hard to escape this hell. Did none of it matter? Was she doomed to despair and death, no matter her actions?

"Klein!" Barrett shouted, shaking her. "Get up, we got to go! We need to find an escape shuttle or something!"

Klein let him lift her to her feet, but she hesitated when he motioned for her to follow. She turned to look at Rouse and April, in the midst of a number of monsters finishing off the crew of the ship. She opened her helmet and looked at Rouse with sadness and regret, wanting to say something but not knowing what to say. She imagined herself looking Rouse in the eyes, but she wasn't sure if that was her face anymore. With a gulp that tried to swallow down the pain, Klein re-engaged her helmet and followed Barrett.

As they hurried through the corridors, Klein fought her conflicting emotions. She wanted this to all be a bad dream, everything since landing on Harmonia. She never got to tell Brandt about her feelings, and just when she had found another she could feel a bond with... that person was taken away too. A part of her wanted to go back, see if there was anything left of the Rouse she knew. But the crippling truth, as Klein reasoned, was that none of this was reversible. If Rouse could make more of those monsters, there was no hope of saving her.

It was then that Klein came up with an idea. She considered it a terrible idea, more of a heroic fiction than an actual plan, and she hated herself for what it meant she would have to do to go through with it. But it might be the only way to prevent this hell from being inflicted on others.

"Barrett, wait!"

Barrett stopped, weapon at the ready even as he turned to look at Klein. "What is it?"

Klein took a deep breath. This was her last chance to simply run from the problem, leave it to someone else. But she knew that would be cowardly. She was a coward if she refused to act, and a villain if she did. But she wanted the pain to end.

"Where would the ship's reactor be? Is there a way to overload it so that it destroys the ship and everything on it?"

Barrett lowered his weapon. "You mean nuking it all, like we did to Harmonia?" He looked away. "I'm a pilot, not an engineer. But the reactor is probably in engineering. Breaking the coolant system and its failsafes would cause the kind of explosion you mean."

Klein nodded slowly. "Show me where it might be, then you can find the escape pod. I'll stay behind to destroy the ship."

"I'll take you there," Barrett started, shaking his head, "But you're not staying behind. We'll have a few minutes to escape before the reactor overheats."

Klein felt like she had an obligation to die for suggesting such a plan at all, but she realized that arguing would only delay the plan and risk failure. "We should hurry."

Barrett nodded, and the two ran through the ship. Screams of pain, the growls of aliens, and the discharge of weapons echoed through the hallways. Eventually, they found the engineering deck, which had escape pod access nearby. Barrett messed with a control panel a bit before simply tearing off the front and cutting wires. After one of the wires shorted, a radiation shield opened and exposed the reactor core.

"You have the laser cutter, so cut down those coolant hoses." Barrett pointed them out. "I'll keep watch for the aliens and give you a heads-up if any show."

Klein didn't want to be responsible for this part, not knowing if she would be able to aim properly. If the reactor didn't blow, the ship would become a derelict and might eventually be picked up by someone who didn't know the dangers of what it carried. But now it was up to her.

"A few on the way, but they're small so I'll be able to pick them off." Barrett said as he began to fire. "Get cracking, or you'll have some new friends to help you out."

Taking a deep breath, Klein took aim at the first coolant hose. She tried to focus, pretending it was an operation. She was no surgeon, but she knew how to assist one. With the precision of a surgeon's assistant, she took the shot.

The coolant hose exploded, sealing itself with the heat of the plasma. Its interrupted stream caused a warning to appear on a nearby screen, but Klein blocked out the noise and took aim at another hose.

Shot after shot, Klein doomed the ship's reactor core, its heart. A few of them were misses, but she still had more than enough charge for the laser cutter to break every hose. Once the last of the failsafes had opened and been shot closed, Klein turned to Barrett. "It's set to explode!"

"Good, because we're gonna have more company in a minute." Barrett changed out the magazine in his rifle and pointed toward the escape pods. "Let's move!"

Another siren joined the existing ones, though the pre-recorded message system was still down, likely dooming those not already headed for escape pods. Klein tried not to think of all the blood that was now on her hands.

Reaching the escape pods, Barrett forced one open by using the emergency override and started prepping it for launch. Klein turned around to keep an eye out for aliens, and gasped when she saw Rouse behind her. That surprise allowed Rouse to grab Klein, drawing her closer to what was once her face. Klein disengaged her helmet by accident and couldn't get it back on, leaving her "face-to-face" with her former friend.

"Ap--... --ied..."

It was a gurgling sound, barely recognizable as speech. But Klein realized that Rouse was trying to speak to her. But her own brain couldn't form a response. "Wh... what?"

"April..." Rouse gurgled again, apparently straining to be understood. "...lied..."

Klein shook her head. "What do you mean...?"

Another voice cut in, much younger-sounding. "Don't play with your food, sister. Your sons can have it if you don't want it."

The final pieces to the puzzle fit in, and Klein didn't want to know the truth she had just learned. "You... you're both..."

Rouse gripped Klein tighter, making her squeak in fear. "K-kill... meee..."

The laser cutter was still in Klein's hand. The first shot could free her, and then should could use the rest of the clip to finish Rouse. But when she tried to set her mind to it, she couldn't pull the trigger. "I... can't..."

A gunshot rang out, and Klein fell to the floor. Barrett took closer aim on Rouse. "I'm sorry it had to come to this, Rouse. But as I said before, I always repay my debts. If you want to die..." He fired again, this time as a burst instead of single-shot. "...then I'll help you."

Rouse collapsed, but it took another few bursts to finally kill her. April was taking cover behind a wall, glaring at Klein and Barrett.

"If you're going to be like that, then Annika will have to be the one to mother our family!"

April jumped out from cover, dashing at Barrett with a blade. Klein felt like she saw it in slow motion, like in a movie. She realized that Barrett wouldn't be able to stop April before she killed him. And then April was going to make Klein into something like Rouse.

Without a thought to how much regret this decision would cause in her, Klein aimed her laser cutter on April, a child. She squeezed the trigger once. That was all it needed.

April's head tumbled to the floor, and her body slumped over. Barrett paused for a moment, apparently shocked at the sight. But he didn't comment on it, instead turning and pushing Klein into the escape pod.

The launch went perfectly, and Barrett flew the pod away from the ship as fast as he could. Checking the viewport and the scanners, Klein searched for other pods, but found none. Her soul felt more and more heavy with each passing moment until, finally, the reactor exploded and sealed that regret in for good. The Panspermia and the ship that had tried to rescue it were both gone, along with everyone onboard.

Barrett looked back at Klein for a moment, as if to say something, then turned back to the controls. He had apparently decided not to say anything. Klein collapsed into her seat, exhaustion causing aches in body and mind. She closed her eyes, as if this alone would turn everything into a bad dream.

\-----

Klein didn't hear from Barrett again after returning to Earth. She heard rumors that Nicolas Corporation was having trouble after its ties to the CIA coverup of Harmonia was exposed, but no news on what had happened to its employees that it laid off in the process.

For her part, she retreated to a small clinic in a minor town in Germany, her homeland. She had her name changed, not wanting the CIA or anyone else after her, since she had testified against Nicolas Corporation and the CIA during the Harmonia trials. Working at the clinic was a waste of her skills and education, but she wanted to live the rest of her life quietly.

A jar of Harmonian sand sat on Klein's nightstand, reminding her every morning and every night of the horrors she had seen. How she had lost Brandt and Rouse, how she had doomed dozens of people to their deaths, how she had intentionally killed a child. She was no longer Annika Klein, so she couldn't go to therapy to try to work through her grief and remorse. And she couldn't be arrogant enough to say that what she did was necessary to save humanity.

Did she make the right choice? Did she sacrifice too much? Should she even have survived? These questions haunted Klein. Sometimes she'd make herself forget for a while, but it would always return. As far as she knew, she would always live with these doubts.

With no way to combat this pain, this guilt, Klein put her hand on the jar of soil, remembering the woman who had given it to her. This memento, meant to remind her of her participation in a historic event, instead the evidence of tragedy. Her soul felt weary as she spoke the empty words: "I'm sorry."


End file.
